Photos by Omar Ornelas | Published March 9, 2018

If a museum director or curator’s job is to determine what is museum-worthy, the vast output of Andy Warhol presents a conundrum.

Mara Gladstone, associate curator of the Palm Springs Art Museum, calls Warhol “probably the most important artist of the late 20th century.” She was tasked with organizing the museum’s new blockbuster exhibition, “Andy Warhol: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation,” curated by Sara Krajewski of the Portland Art Museum, and on display through May 28.

It includes 250 pieces of art, taking up two sides of the museum’s main floor galleries. That includes prints of some of Warhol’s most famous works, including his series of Campbell's Soup Cans and Marilyn Monroe and Chairman Mao portraits. But that’s just a small percentage of the Warhol collection of part-time Coachella Valley resident Jordan Schnitzer, and a tiny fraction of what Warhol considered his art.

Because Warhol considered everything art.

“Warhol would say art is what you want it to be,” said Gladstone. “He made people art – he made his (underground film actors) Superstars. Films, music, 2-D images, sculptures, experiences, performances, everything was art. Warhol didn’t discriminate. He saw the way everyday people think about images as a powerful relationship and as one where those commercial images had as much power as the great paintings we are used to seeing museums.”

Andy Warhol: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer at the Palm Springs Art Museum.

(Photo: Omar Ornelas/The Desert Sun)

“Probably the biggest thing he did was this democratization of art,” said Schnitzer, who has allowed his Warhol collection to tour museums around the country. “He rallied against the art that was just in these museums for the elitist few. If there’s one thing he was able to accomplish, like the break-down of the Berlin Wall, it was to break down that mindset.”

Picasso was the greatest artist of the first half of the 20th century because the cultural revolution of still photography and motion pictures demanded a new conceptualization of art. Picasso provided that. His was an abstract art reflecting the zeitgeist at the turn of the 20th century of a people fascinated by the new Freudian psychology and stressed by the tension of the industrial revolution.

Warhol captured the zeitgeist of a post-World War II world influenced by the cultural revolution of television and a saturation of advertising. That prompted a major shift in expression from words to icons. It made the abstract expressionism that grew from a fascination with the subconscious almost old-fashioned.

The museum exhibition shows an early untitled water color, ink and graphite abstract Warhol created in 1947. But Warhol evolved as an artist to add underground movies, TV shows and his own Interview magazine to his resume. He became well known in the music industry for his album covers and management of the influential Velvet Underground in the 1960s. Yet silk screen portraits remained his primary source of income and the pop art he made through his print-making process may be his most important cultural contribution.

“With his pictorial degree from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, he was first a graphic artist,” said Schnitzer. “He was trained to see things in terms of art around us. Go to the grocery store and look at the labels, the shapes, the forms. He was brilliant at that."

He also understood America's post-World War II love affair with consumerism and materialism.

"If we go back in time as to what Andy Warhol and the country was experiencing, the biggest change in post-World War II was the television set," he said. "Until television, no one had the power (to ensure) that on every set on Sunday night you’d be seeing Clairol hair products.

"So, if artists are chroniclers of our time, they couldn’t go back and do abstract expressionism. They had to do something different, and they reflected the times of that post-World War II America. The central theme I see in most of his work was, how does the individual maintain his sense of self when you’re being bombarded with messages and images?”

Andy Warhol: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer at the Palm Springs Art Museum.

(Photo: Omar Ornelas/The Desert Sun)

That’s why Gladstone calls Warhol the most important artist of his time.

“He saw the power of media and of images in popular culture, and he anticipated the saturation of visual images and the current state of our everyday life,” she said. “He probably would have been pretty thrilled to see what’s happening now.”

That's reason enough for the giant exhibition. But there's another.

One of the biggest events in Warhol’s life happened 50 years ago this June, when he was shot and almost killed by an actress in his low-budget “underground” art films. After that, Warhol became obsessed with documenting in his life, and he considered those documentations – from bill receipts to tubes of used toothpaste – art worth that was saving.

You won’t find Warhol’s used toothpaste in the Palm Springs exhibition, but Gladstone said it could be worthy.

“I think some people have put tubes of toothpaste on view,” she said. “I think if there is historical conceptual import in an object and, if we can think about what an artist’s life is, what they’ve done, the trajectory of their work, then sure, I would consider putting some toothpaste in a gallery.”

Elizabeth Armstrong, the JoAnne McGrath executive director of the museum, said one reason for presenting this exhibition now is opportunity.

The museum curators saw it recently at the Portland Art Museum and recognized its importance. With Schnitzer being the son of a museum board member, and Armstrong being a former print curator who has known of Schnitzer’s collection for 25 years, the museum was given permission to borrow any of the many Schnitzer exhibits on tour and curate them any way they wanted.

But this show also fits the museum’s mission to “present great art that is culturally relevant in this time and place.” The museum balances group shows with immersive surveys of single artists, she said, including Julius Shulman and Edward Curtis photographs, Richard Diebenkorn paintings, John Baldessari prints, “and now Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer at the Palm Springs Art Museum.

(Photo: Omar Ornelas/The Desert Sun)

“Every generation rediscovers Andy Warhol,” she said. “We all have our own assessment of Warhol, but I think we could agree that he was one of the most influential and controversial artists of the second half of the 20th century. Given the opportunity to share this artist's work in an in-depth way, almost any museum would take it.”

But the Palm Springs museum also serves a region that is unusually intimate with the artist. Warhol was fascinated with the rich and famous, so it’s not surprising that many desert residents knew him personally.

Rancho Mirage actor Gavin MacLeod, who starred in the 1980s TV series, "The Love Boat," recalls Warhol appearing on that show in 1985. They spent a week together on an episode with Raymond St. Jacques playing Warhol's "drag queen" companion, plus Milton Berle, Andy Griffith, Cloris Leachman, Marion Ross and her "Happy Days" co-star, future Rancho Mirage resident Tom Bosley. MacLeod said Warhol seemed thrilled to be on the show, although he complained in "The Andy Warhol Diaries" about not making the cover of TV Guide.

Rancho Mirage actress Kaye Ballard recalled working with Warhol on the 1963 James Thurber Broadway musical, "The Beast in Me." He did the costumes because his favorite soap opera star, Haila Stoddard from "The Secret Storm," was in it. Later, Warhol invited her to his townhouse and she said it was wall-papered in aluminum foil. "I said, 'What is this?' Ballard recalled. "He said, 'It's an environment!"

This portrait of Andy Warhol by Michael Childers is featured in "Photographs of Michael Childers: Having A Ball: Portraits of Andy Warhol at His New York Studio and Paris home. (Photo: Courtesy of Michael Childers)

Michael Childers took this photo of Andy Warhol in his New York studio after Warhol showed an attraction to a fur coat. The photo is included in the Palm Springs Art Museum's "Photographs of Michael Childers: Having A Ball." (Photo: Courtesy of Michael Childers)

"Andy Warhol, Self Portrait in Fright Wig" is part of the collection of James Curtis/The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. (Photo: Gannett file photo courtesy of the Andy Warhol Foundation)

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Palm Springs actress Lucie Arnaz had several encounters with Warhol, who regularly watched TV re-runs of her parents on "I Love Lucy." She was on the cover of one of his 1978 Interview magazines. But Arnaz never found him engaging enough to generate any stories about him she wanted to share.

Conversely, Palm Springs actress and fine artist Susan "Viva" Hoffman was one of Warhol's most significant actresses, a successor to his early muse, Edie Sedgwick, immortalized by the Rolling Stones as the "Factory Girl." Viva wrote a book about her experiences working in Warhol's art Factory, titled "Superstar Underground," and she is considering a sequel. But she says, "I only worked with Andy for a short 15 months, minus the three he was in the hospital, during which time all we did was work."

The museum commissioned a short documentary on local residents who knew and worked with Warhol, produced by Interview magazine photographer Michael Childers and directed by Marc Saltarelli. Viva chose not to share stories with Childers or The Desert Sun, saying simply, "I leave the philosophy, and history, to those more qualified."

Several of Warhol's Coachella Valley-based colleagues did share their stories of the artist, starting with Childers, who was interviewed before he began his documentary, "I Knew Andy Warhol," now featured in the museum exhibit. These are their stories:

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More than 30 years after his death, Warhol's ability to make the ordinary extraordinary forever changed the way we document life.

Michael Childers,
Rancho Mirage

Michael Childers at his home in Rancho Mirage, California photographed in February 2018. (Photo: Omar Ornelas/The Desert Sun)

Art photographer and producer who stages events such as last January's "Icons & Idols" variety show and the “One Night Only” revue benefiting Jewish Family Services April 25 at the McCallum Theatre. Childers started as a rock photographer, having gone to UCLA film school with Jim Morrison of The Doors. Ballard introduced him to the late director, John Schlesinger, and Childers left UCLA to become his life partner and film assistant. Childers secured many of Warhol’s “Superstars” for a party scene in Schlesinger’s 1970 film, “Midnight Cowboy,” helping it become the first X-rated Oscar-winning Best Picture. His portraits are now featured in the Palm Springs Art Museum exhibit, “Having A Ball: Photographs of Michael Childers,” including unique photos of Warhol at his Paris home.

ENTERING WARHOL'S WORLD: Childers met Andy through Warhol’s film director, Paul Morrissey, at Max’s Kansas City, a bar on Park Avenue South, New York, that was just a block away from the second incarnation of Warhol’s studio, the Factory. Warhol would create silk screen portraits, record the Velvet Underground and make underground movies at the Factory, and then hang out at Max’s.

“I spent a lot of evenings at Max’s with the Superstars: Ultra Violet, Viva, Holly Woodlawn,” said Childers. “There’d be artists like Robert Raushenberg and Larry Rivers dancing on the bar with a bottle of Jack Daniels. Salvador Dali would be there with Amanda Leer, the first transsexual I ever met. Extraordinary people.

Caption: This portrait of Andy Warhol by Michael Childers is featured in "Photographs of Michael Childers: Having A Ball: Portraits of Andy Warhol at His New York Studio and Paris home.

“There’s a party sequence in ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ in a loft, and I said, ‘John, let’s use the Warhol people.’ I directed a little underground movie with Paul Morrissey that is projected on the screen in ‘Midnight Cowboy.’ I’m running the projector of that underground movie with Joe Dallesandro. Right behind us is Joe Buck (played by) Jon Voight, smoking a joint with Brenda Vaccaro putting the make on him. They go into a dark room, which is my dark room, and those photographs in the sink are my photographs of all the Superstars.

“Andy was going to be in the movie, but he was shot 10 days before we started shooting. I was at the film studio in Harlem, and Viva was on the phone with the Factory and she started screaming, ‘Andy’s been shot!’ I can’t remember who she was talking to. She was about to talk to Andy and she heard some shots go off.”

Viva said she was on the phone with Warhol when he was shot by Valerie Solanas, founder of the radical feminist organization, SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) who appeared in the 1967 Warhol-Morrissey film, “Bike Boy” with Viva.

Warhol met Solanas after losing a script she had submitted to him. When she demanded payment, he offered her a part in “I, A Man,” for his standard $25 fee. Enraged at being exploited by Warhol, she walked into the Factory on June 3, 1968, and shot him with a .32 caliber automatic pistol. Warhol was pronounced clinically dead at Columbus Hospital a half-hour later, but was revived by open-heart massage. Solanas turned herself into a police officer and, a year later was sentenced to three years in prison for “reckless assault with intent to harm.” She was given a year off for time served in a mental institution.

Warhol would never be the same. He said he felt somehow removed from life. “Like, I can’t say hello or good-bye to people. Life’s like a dream," biographer Arthur C. Danto reported him saying.

Warhol began taping his thoughts and conversations while in the hospital. He hired Barnard College student Pat Hackett that fall to transcribe everything he recorded. The next year, he founded Interview magazine based on the concept that interviews should be un-edited to be real. It evolved into a unique concept of celebrities interviewing celebrities and it ultimately became a vehicle for Warhol to meet rich and famous people to solicit portraits. Warhol got many celebrities to pay $25,000 per silk screen portrait.

Michael Childers at his home in Rancho Mirage, California photographed in February 2018. (Photo: Omar Ornelas/The Desert Sun)

Childers was hired to shoot photographs for Interview after Warhol saw his work in After Dark magazine. Rolling Stone became famous for its long-form Q&As after launching in November 1967, but Childers says After Dark influenced its photographic content.

“I think it came about because he saw After Dark and said, ‘I can do better,’” Childers said. “He wanted it to be a more glamorous, more elegant with beautiful graphics and great layout, and because Andy was becoming so famous, he could get anyone he wanted. I said, ‘Andy, what do you want me to photograph for Interview?’ He said, ‘Oh Michael, I want beautiful people. Make them more beautiful. And I like rich people. If they’re beautiful and rich, I’ll give you more pages.’

“I got big, beautiful pages and it made my entré into the New York art world. Plus, I got to go into the VIP entrance at Studio 54 with Andy to dance all night with Truman Capote and Jackie Kennedy.”

DEFINING ANDY: “Andy was about 10 years ahead of most of the other artists in New York," said Childers. "The publicity for his (controversial) films certainly didn’t hurt his art career. He was a one-man publicity machine. Most of all, Andy was a voyeur who I think used people very well. Some people say he abused them. He was a user. Because the Warhol mystique was so big, starting in 1965-66, the Velvet Underground – Lou Reed, Nico – wanted to be part of the Warhol scene. He would use them, too, and they did very well by him. There were all sorts of people around him in those days.”

Cherry Vanilla, Palm Springs

Real name Kathy Dorritie. Songwriter, poet, author of the 2010 memoir, “Lick Me;” actress' publicist and founder of Europa Entertainment. She started producing radio and TV commercials in New York in the ‘60s while DJing at a small nightclub on the Upper East Side. She auditioned “on a lark” for the underground theater company, Theatre of the Ridiculous, and her advertising “look” got her a part. But she soon dove into the underground culture, doing nude plays like “The Dirtiest Show in Town,” writing for rock and men’s magazines, and creating anti-Vietnam tapes under the name Cherry Vanilla. The name stuck when David Bowie’s first wife, Angela, began calling her “Vanilla.” She registered it with Actors Equity and then became Bowie’s U.S. publicist for two years. Returning to performing, she toured Europe with the early Police as her backup band.

ENTERING WARHOL'S WORLD: “I had been to Max’s Kansas City many a time, but I would sit in the front room where the advertising people sat," Vanilla said. "The artists would be seated on another side and you’d see all these crazy people going into the back room. There was an intimidation about the back room, so I never went back. But, when I got with these theatre people, they all hung there, so I marched right into the back room with them and was accepted immediately. In the back room, almost every night, was Andy Warhol sitting in a round table in the corner with a little entourage. That’s where I first met Andy.”

Warhol’s penchant for recording people’s conversations inspired him to turn his transcribed telephone conversation with his Superstar, Brigid Polk (daughter of Hearst media chairman Richard Berlin and a close friend of Patty Hearst), into a play by Anthony Ingrassia of Theatre of the Ridiculous. Anthony Zanetta played the Warhol character, who taped Polk's “dirty talk” and took lightly pornographic pictures of characters inspired by Polk (called Pork) and Viva (called Vulva). Warhol auditioned Vanilla for the lead in “Andy Warhol’s Pork” when it got booked for London in 1971. So she saw how Warhol’s talent for turning trashy glitter and gender-bending spectacle into art inspired Bowie to evolve into his Ziggy Stardust character.

"The play was pretty much a sensation in London that summer and David was a big Warhol fan," said Vanilla. "And a big fan of the Velvet Underground. He really wanted to meet Andy, but he met me instead.”

Andy Warhol: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer at the Palm Springs Art Museum.

(Photo: Omar Ornelas/The Desert Sun)

Bowie wrote a song called “Andy Warhol” for his 1971 breakthrough album, “Hunky Dory” that might have been inspired by Vanilla.

“Dana Gillespie was a girlfriend of David’s (from their early teen years) and Dana came to audition for “Pork” in London and to be my understudy,” said Vanilla. “She brought the script back to Bowie and he wrote that song for her to record, and she did. He produced her doing it. That’s where we met Bowie and Dana and (Bowie manager) Tony Defries and Angela, while we were in London doing ‘Pork.’ He was naturally attracted to it. So, I was there for the writing of the song.”

DEFINING ANDY: “I wouldn’t consider myself in his inner circle. We were cordial because of Max’s and we’d see each other at parties. He’d whisper in my ear, ‘Tell me if that boy has a big penis.’ Silly little things like that. I didn’t hang out at Studio 54 because, at that point, you were either disco or you were rock and I decided I was rock.

“In some ways, he was so simple and straight. He was a good Catholic boy and he loved his mama. But, he was the strangest (character) in a way. I love people who have this confidence – they just know they are worth something. He had that. He didn’t go around boasting. He used other people around him to do that. So did Bowie.

“He did really change so much, just like Bowie. Bowie enabled a lot of weirdo kids to be themselves, which means being an artist. Andy opened the door for Bowie and Bowie opened the door for the rock and roll world.”

Chairman and co-founder of the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival; entrepreneur who developed the Hollywood Diet, the Hollywood Cookie Diet and the Hollywood 15-Day Detox; charity activist with social partner Helene Galen; ex-husband of Elizabeth Rosensteil, whose mother, Leonore Annenberg, was chief of protocol in the Ronald Reagan White House. Kabler was assistant chief of protocol in Gerald Ford's White House before his marriage to Elizabeth, under Henry Catto Jr. and Shirley Temple Black.

ENTERING WARHOL'S WORLD: Kabler was in charge of protocol for state visits in 1975 when Warhol wanted to meet Washington, D.C., dignitaries, particularly Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had just married socialite Nancy Maginnes. Interview editor Bob Colacello knew Washington socialite Ina Ginsburg and Kabler had known Edie Sedgwick. He and Ginsburg hosted a party for Warhol attended by the Kissingers, U.S. senators, socialites and Warhol business associates who handled Warhol’s art commissions.

“He wanted to break into Washington and we had a great turnout,” Kabler said. “Three tables of 10 and I think eight senators. It was a real Washington who’s who and everyone was so surprised. They expected Andy to be more revolutionary, more extreme. I remember in college having gone to see a few of (his films). You were there to see the nudity. He produced the first films I ever saw with frontal nudity. And he was very conservative. He wore a coat and tie with jeans, which was sort of his go-to look, and he couldn’t have been more charming. He was very soft-spoken.

“Everybody wanted to meet Andy. Interview magazine had just launched, and Ina and I got Washington people to agree to be interviewed by Interview. Jack Ford was on the cover. Susan Ford was on the cover (Gerald and Betty Ford’s kids). After the dinner party, they stayed on for a couple days, and I got Jack and Susan to welcome them to the White House and give them a tour. And they hit it off. So Andy visited the White House for the first time during the Fords (administration).

A photograph of Edie Sedwick is displayed at 2005 exhibition in New York City.

(Photo: Donald Bowers, Getty Images)

“It culminated with Nancy and Ron Reagan on the cover of Interview. I introduced Andy to Ron Reagan Jr. (when) I was a volunteer for the Reagans in the 1980 presidential campaign. I handled the Reagan family — three of the kids. I never met Patty. When Reagan was elected, Ron and his wife, Doria, invited (Warhol) to the White House.”

Jamie and Elizabeth Kabler moved to New York after their 1979 marriage and remained friends with Warhol until his death in 1987. They paid Warhol $25,000 to create Elizabeth’s portrait and Kabler called it “the best $25,000 we ever spent.” They hosted parties with New York socialites, visited Warhol’s Factory and attended several lunches with Warhol. Kabler also invested in theatrical shows. “Marilyn: An American Fable” had 16 shows in 1983 after 35 previews. Warhol attended the opening, which meant a lot to Kabler.

“Andy would go to the opening of a toothpaste factory," he said. "He went out every night. I produced ‘Tango Argentino’ and I was bringing the show to Japan. Mel Howard and I took over this restaurant in New York and we had tango dancers dance across (the floor) for the Japanese press. Andy came to that. I introduced a product with zinc, which was white zinc oxide and floral colors, at a store in New York, Fiorucci. Andy showed up for that. He always showed up and people appreciated him. You could count on him.”

DEFINING ANDY: “People don’t give Andy credit, but Interview changed the way we read interviews. It was all done with Q&As. Playboy did Q&As, but Andy perfected it, and it had great photographs.

“Bringing Andy to the White House was a big breakthrough and it never would have happened under Nixon. It wouldn't have happened under Reagan if Ron Jr. hadn't intervened to get Andy back and make him acceptable. Nancy would do anything for her son. But the Fords got it right away.”

“So, Andy dies and the last contact I had, one of his assistants in the Factory called me and offered to do a portrait. He says, ‘I did Andy’s work. Do you want a Warhol portrait?’ I said, ‘No, I have one.’”

Udo Kier, Palm Springs

Udo Kier, a friend and collaborator of Andy Warhol is photographed at his home in the winter of 2018.(Photo: Omar Ornelas/The Desert Sun)

German actor, artist, art collector and landscape artist at homes in the low and high deserts. He's enjoyed a renaissance since appearing last year in Alexander Payne's “Downsizing” with Matt Damon. He has 16 films or TV shows being released or in various stages of development this year. He attended last month's Berlin Film Festival for the premiere of “Daughter of Mine,” which was nominated for Best Film, and “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot,” by his friend and fellow Palm Springs resident, Gus Van Sant. He’s starring in a remake of the classic 1931 Frtiz Lang film, “M,” for a German TV series. He co-stars in “The Painted Bird” opposite Harvey Keitel, “Ulysses: A Dark Odyssey” with Danny Glover, “The Mountain,” opposite Jeff Goldblum and “Dragged Across Concrete” with Mel Gibson. He has the title role in the latest version of the American horror franchise, “The Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich.” He was born on Oct. 14, 1944 in Cologne, Germany amid the bombing of a Third Reich hospital and has become a cult figure for his many roles in art films and horror classics such as “Mark of the Devil,” “The Story of O,” “Europa” and Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho.”

ENTERING WARHOL'S WORLD: Kier was seated on a plane from Rome to Munich in 1972 with Paul Morrissey, who introduced himself by saying, “I make movies for Andy Warhol.” Kier gave him his head shot and Morrissey offered him the lead in “Flesh for Frankenstein,” an early 3-D film for Italian producers including Sophia Loren’s husband, Carlo Ponti. “Andy came to have his picture taken with me,” said Kier.

After they finished “Frankenstein,” Morrissey put Kier and his co-star, Warhol regular Joe Dallesandro, in “Blood for Dracula.” This time, Warhol got a producing credit.

“Andy did not influence Paul Morrissey and there was not a script,” said Kier. “For ‘Dracula,’ for example, we were in the middle and we did not know how it would end. Andy became famous for films like ‘Empire’ (a single shot of the Empire State Building from twilight until 3 a.m.) and ‘A Man Sleeping.’ In ‘A Man Sleeping,’ (actors Viva and Louis Walden) were in bed and Andy came every 10 minutes because he had to reload the camera. That’s all he did.”

Kier thinks Warhol was a bigger celebrity in Europe than America in the late 1960s and early ‘70s because Europeans appreciated his movies as art while Americans were focused on their prurient or lack of commercial appeal.

“Everybody talked about Andy Warhol at that time in Germany because of (Warhol's film) ‘Flesh,’” Kier said. “The movies were not censored because it was art. You could see naked people, without having sex. It wasn’t cut because it was Andy Warhol art.

“It was very amazing when we were living in Rome doing ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Dracula’ on the street. We had a rented house and some rich German woman had ordered a portrait. So, he made four in different colors and put them on the chimney. One was $30,000. If you bought all four it was $100,000. So the woman was looking, ‘Hmm. They’re all nice. How many did Miss – XO, whatever – buy?’ And he said, ‘All four.’ So she called her husband and came back and said, ‘I’ll buy all four.’ I said to Andy, ‘Since she’s not a star, what would you have done if she had not bought all four?’ He said, ‘I would have painted over them.’”

Kier, who has one Andy Warhol portrait in his art collection, socialized with Warhol in New York, Paris and Rome.

“Andy was a person who would never travel by himself,” he said. “He always had three or four people because three or four people can see or hear more. Andy always had his tape recorder. For example, when we had dinner in Rome with Bianca Jagger and Mick Jagger, the tape recorder was in the middle of the table. So, he starts talking louder.”

Andy Warhol: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer at the Palm Springs Art Museum.

(Photo: Omar Ornelas/The Desert Sun)

DEFINING ANDY: Kier said Warhol’s greatest contribution was his re-definition of art. To Warhol, everything was art, said Kier. That’s why he recorded everything.

“I saw an exhibition after he died in Frankfurt at a big museum and they had big boxes,” he said. “There were all the receipts. I went with him to an opening in Paris and everywhere people went to him with a piece of bread, and he was signing the bread. For everybody, everything: t-shirts, whenever people put a shoe out, he would sign it. I have a magazine, an Interview, and (director Roman) Polanski had said something very nice about me. I said to Andy, ‘Can you sign it for me?’ He said, ‘Sure. Where?’ I said, ‘Every page.’ So, I have maybe 60 signatures, ‘Udo with love, Andy Warhol. Udo with love, Andy Warhol. Udo with love, Andy Warhol.’ He signed the whole thing.

“When Warhol died. it was kind of a sad moment because he was representing this era of pop art. He was the most famous one.”

Lorna Luft, Rancho Mirage

Lorna Luft, photographed at The Living Desert in Palm Desert.(Photo: Crystal Chatham, The Desert Sun)

Singer, actress, currently creating a cabaret show on “The Women Who Wrote the Words,” emphasizing female lyricists who toiled in New York's Tin Pan Alley songwriting industry. She is the daughter of film and music legend Judy Garland and the younger half-sister of film and music star, Liza Minnelli. Frank Sinatra was her godfather. She made her show business debut at age 11 on “The Judy Garland Show,” and first appeared on Broadway in 1971 in “Promises, Promises.” After that, she gravitated to the New York social scene at the Studio 54 disco, where Minnelli and Warhol were regulars.

HOW SHE MET WARHOL: “I didn’t meet Andy when the Factory was first started (in 1962 on East 47th Street, 1967 at Union Square West). I met Andy when Andy had really got into ‘society.’

“I guess we became really good friends because I didn’t treat him any differently than I treated anyone else. I was out with Andy for many years, pretty much every night. We spent time in California together. Andy loved the whole Hollywood history. I would just tell him stories and he loved all of that. Andy was meticulous and smart and very shrewd, but he came across incredibly childlike. That’s why people thought, ‘OK, I can tell him things.’ He’s so, ‘Ooh, yeah. Oh, wow!’ And he stored it all!”

Warhol is quoted in Colacello’s book, “Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up” as asking Luft what Burt Reynolds was like in bed. He doesn’t get a reply, but Luft said it didn’t bother her when Warhol asked such personal questions.

“It didn’t bother me because of the way he did it,” she said. “It wasn’t like he was sitting there doing an interview. He would say, ‘Didn’t your mom once say?’ or ‘What happened that night?’ He said things in an unobtrusive and unthreatening way, and when he invited you to the Factory for lunch, he didn’t hide the tape recorder. The tape recorder was out on the table. So, if you said something, you knew that. And he was constantly taking Polaroids, so, you knew that. Everyone says, ‘I can’t believe he taped that.’ Well, he sat there with a tape recorder. The only thing he was a bad boy about was, he would call people and he would tape those conversations."

“I think because he saw his life literally pass in front of him when he was shot, he started with the Polaroids; he started literally categorizing his entire life every single day,” said Luft. “He thought he got a second chance. That’s when he said, ‘I’m going to document my entire life.’

Luft was once on the cover of Interview and Warhol did her portrait, paid for by her sister, which she called “one of the greatest things” anybody did for her.

“I was lucky enough to be Andy’s friend, and he was good to me,” Luft said. “So, I have nothing to say about him except I really loved him.”

"Andy Warhol: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer" at the Palm Springs Art Museum includes a portrait of Luft's mother, Judy Garland on a wall at lower right.

(Photo: Omar Ornelas/The Desert Sun)

DEFINING ANDY: Luft sees parallels between the way Sinatra and Warhol have remained influential and part of the public conversation 20 and 30 years after their deaths. Like Sinatra, Warhol turned his life into an art and drew from it for his art.

“Andy, like Sinatra, was an original,” said Luft. “He was a visionary. Andy literally came up with the phrase, ‘Everybody’s going to be famous for 15 minutes’ and he had no idea how right on he was. Because he traveled in so many strange circles, where he had the people in the Factory and all of the (Superstars) like the Joe Dallesandros and the Holly Woodlongs and the Candy Darlings, he was the original reality show and he knew it. And he never acted like that. He was never arrogant. He was childlike in a certain way, and that was a really great act.”

For your Warhol edification

"Andy Warhol: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation," on view through May 28 on the Palm Springs Art Museum’s main floor galleries. Featuring more than 250 pieces, including iconic works such as "Marilyn" (1967), "Campbell’s Soup I and II" (1968), "Sunset" and "Mao" (both 1972). The exhibit curated by Sara Krajewsk of the Portland Art Museum and organized by Palm Springs Art Museum associate curator Mara Gladstone also explores Warhol’s silkscreen process, unique dresses, graphic ephemera, rare books, Warhol-designed album covers, listening stations and other interactive elements.